A year ago the Indian writer Arundhati Roy chronicled the early stages of the pandemic in her “poor-rich country … suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism.” Horrified by a lockdown that prime minister Narendra Modi imposed with just four hours notice, she described a mass displacement that reminded her of Partition. A Muslim carpenter who was forced by the announcement to walk 500 miles back to his rural home told her: “Maybe when Modiji decided to do [the lockdown], nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us.” Which prompted Roy to note that: “‘Us’ means approximately 460m people.”
The Guardian has just published a searing sequel to Roy’s earlier dispatch. In it she surveys the “unfolding catastrophe” that Modi has wrought. She begins by referring to a speech at the World Economic Forum in January in which Modi showed no sympathy to other nations stricken by the pandemic, choosing instead to brag about India’s rapidly modernising infrastructure, and boasting that it “has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.” The tragedy prompted by this hubris has arrived swiftly.
The full extent of the horror now engulfing India is hard to describe. As Roy observes: “Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes. Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood… Oxygen [has become] the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange.”
Despite strong evidence that oxygen shortages have caused many deaths in India’s hospitals, Modi’s allies have threatened anyone who states the obvious. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organisation in which Modi and several BJP ministers are lifetime members, has railed against “anti-India forces” taking advantage of the crisis to spread “negativity” and sow “mistrust.” Predictably, Twitter has cooperated with the government and deactivated critical accounts. To date the mainstream media has also proved reluctant to highlight the government’s obvious failures to foresee the current crisis and prepare for it.
The consequences of widespread political intimidation make it hard for outsiders to rely on official figures for infections and deaths. Roy compares these to “the wall that was built in Ahmedabad to hide the slums [from] Donald Trump … on his way to the “Namaste Trump” event that Modi hosted for him in February 2020.” As the BJP government strives to maintain this carefully honed public relations image, Roy writes: “In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but die as disposables.”
Most mainstream media pundits claim that Covid has overwhelmed India’s healthcare system. Roy shows that this is nonsense. “This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with a nonexistent public healthcare system.” Official figures show less than 1.5 percent of India’s GDP is spent on health and Roy suggests the true amount may be as low as 0.34 percent. (For context, the Commonwealth Fund estimates, from 2018 figures, that the corresponding portions in the US, Germany and Canada are 16.9, 11.2 and 10.7 percent respectively.) During the crisis, even though India is a leading manufacturer of Covid vaccines, no provision has been made for free mass vaccinations. Instead, private healthcare companies have reaped obscene profits while leaving the mass of citizens to fend for themselves.
India’s horrendous suffering cannot be attributed solely to the vicissitudes of Covid-19. The current catastrophe is the outcome of a political system riddled with cronyism and fuelled by religious bigotry and caste discrimination. As governments in other countries ponder what might be done to provide urgent relief, to move beyond the current “us and them” arrangements which have caused so many bottlenecks in the supply of medical necessities, we should remember that “them”, in this case, means approximately 1.3 billion people.
